Spring Energy - Nutrition Integrity and Transparency #226 - KoopCast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
trail and ultra runners.
What is going on?
What's happening?
Welcome to another episode ofthe coop cast.
As always, I am your humblehost, coach jason coop, and this
episode of the podcast is allgoing to be about the spring
energy controversy, which I havefound myself in the middle of
and I guess you could say I putmyself in the middle of very
deliberately.

(00:30):
I brought together the group ofour research essentials for
ultra running team to discussthis very topic because,
ironically, we have a lot ofexperience in this area.
We have experience managingcrisis communications.
We have experience in nutrition.
We have experience partneringwith nutrition companies to help
them make nutrition products.

(00:51):
All of these aspects that havecome to light within this spring
nutrition controversy weactually have lived and can lend
authentic and expertise opinionon, and so I got the group
together of Stephanie Howe, nickTaylor and Jim Rutberg and
myself to discuss some of theaspects related to this, and our
intent with this was tohopefully deliver a toolkit to

(01:13):
you guys, the listeners, to kindof weed through as you're
trying to navigate what toactually do with all of this,
and so I hope you guys rememberthat as we are going through
this.
I want to start out with thefacts.
So several weeks ago I sentfour different products off to a
nutrition laboratory called RLNutrition Labs in Washington.

(01:35):
I sent off Spring's AwesomeSauce product, I sent off their
Canterbury product, I sent offtheir Hill Aid product and I
sent off their Goo ChocolateOutrage, as I sent off their
Hill aid product and I sent offtheir goo chocolate outrage as
kind of a poor excuses ofcontrol.
And I got the results backseveral days ago and I started
publishing them on social mediaand on my website as I got them

(01:57):
in and I'm just going to runthrough them very factually to
start out with.
So, first off, we're going tostart out with the awesome sauce
product.
So the off, we're going tostart out with the Awesome Sauce
product.
So the Awesome Sauce productclaims that it has 180 calories
in the actual packet.
That was analyzed by the lab at75 calories in it and that's a
difference of 58%.
The Awesome Sauce productclaims to have 45 grams of

(02:20):
carbohydrate and it was actuallyanalyzed to have 17.9.
We'll round that up to 18 gramsof carbohydrate for a
difference of 60%.
Springs Hill Aid claims to have120 calories in the packet and
the lab analyzed the Hill Aidthat I sent over to the lab to
have 48 calories in it, for adifference of 59.9%.

(02:44):
Hill-aid claims to have 20grams of carbohydrate and a lab
analyzed it to have 10.29 gramsof carbohydrate, which is 48.55%
less than what is actually onthe label.
The Canterbury product claimsto have 100 calories in the gel
pretty neat, nice round numberbut the lab analyzed it to have
43.3 calories and thatconstitutes a miss of 56.7%.

(03:10):
And finally, the Canterburyproduct claims to have 17 grams
of carbohydrate in it and onlyhas 9.66 grams.
We can round that up to 10 fora miss of 40%.
The goo chocolate outrage iswhat it says.
It is Claims to be 100 calories, the lab analyzed it to be 112
calories.
Claims to have 21 grams ofcarbohydrates, and we analyzed

(03:32):
it, or the lab analyzed it to be24 grams of carbohydrates.
Now I want to add a little bitmore specificity to how this
actually all came to light.
I ordered all of these productsas any other consumer would
actually order them.
I ordered them through the feedand through Spring's own
website.
I had those orders shippeddirectly to the lab.

(03:52):
Do not pass go.
They did not come to my house,they didn't go anywhere else.
The lab received them and theyprocessed the whole thing.
I contacted the lab as a normalconsumer hey, I'm going to send
you guys these products, goahead and analyze them and let
me know what your results are.
And, as a strange twist ofirony, the results were actually
coming back a little bitdelayed and I was getting a

(04:13):
little bit frustrated with thelab because they promised it on
one day and they weren'tdelivering it, kind of day after
day.
And finally the lab actuallyhad to call me because they
thought that there was somethingwrong with their analysis
because the samples that theywere running were so far off of
the claims.
So if anything tells us thatsomething was awry, it was that
you have a commercial grade foodlab that receives product

(04:35):
that's clearly marked to have acertain type, a certain amount
of nutritional composition, andthey are distrusting their own
analysis.
They are doubting their ownanalysis because what they are
analyzing is so far off of theclaims.
Now I'd like to also point outthat the results of this are not
surprising to me, because therehave been several other

(04:57):
attempts at doing this out inthe community.
We talk about this in thepodcast.
People have dehydrated theseproducts and come down to a
similar amount of carbohydratecontent.
Sport Hunger over in Germanydid an actual lab analysis,
which I asked for in advance,and they came out with a similar
calorie and carbohydratecontent for Awesome Sauce, and
so none of this is actuallysurprising, and I'm actually the

(05:18):
laggard in the entire grouphere.
So with that as a little bit ofa backdrop, we're going to get
into it with our entire team andgo over the history of why we
are where we are, all of thedifferent home experiments, all
of the different theories thathave been out there, and then
what I actually did, and thenwhat we actually think about it,
and we kind of divide thisamongst three things.

(05:39):
First off is just the outrightnutrition myths across all of
these products and what thatactually means and what we can
actually decipher from it.
The second piece of it is howspring is actually handling this
and how we can read between thelines, so to speak, in terms of
what is actually going onbehind the scenes, and can we
actually trust them and shouldwe actually trust them again.

(06:00):
And another piece that isfloating on the background is
how do these products actuallyget developed in the first place
, and I know a lot of you guysdon't have an incredibly
intimate view of this, and norshould you guys see people on
Instagram.
Hey, we went into thismanufacturing plan and it looks
amazing and here are all theseproducts.
But when products are developedcorrectly, there's actually a

(06:20):
lot of people and expertiseinvolved, and the four of us
here have actually had a lot ofthat experience.
There's probably over 20different products represented,
of which we have had variouslevels of involvement.
Some of that involvement hasbeen very intimate and very
detailed, and other of it hasbeen very superficial, and I
think we can bring all of thatexpertise together and hopefully

(06:42):
peel the curtain back a littlebit on how this process actually
happens.
So that's it.
I'm going to get right out ofthe way.
We're going to go right intothe history of it with the group
.
Here is more on ourconversation all about spring
energy and what we know and whatwe're going to take into the
future Now that we've got thefacts straight.

(07:05):
It's kind of rewind with areally brief history lesson.
I'm going to blow.
I'm going to blow through this,so apologies to those who were
tangentially involved if I don'tgive you a shout out several
weeks ago.
The reddit community of allpeople shout out to the reddit
community.
They usually get a lot of shitbecause you can be like
anonymous and there's a lot ofdegeneracy going on in the

(07:25):
Reddit community and it's justfun for conspiracy theories and
things like that, the ultrarunning thread of the Reddit
community.
One Redditor in particularstarted to postulate that
awesome sauce.
Very specifically, theycouldn't really make sense of
the calorie and the carbohydratecount compared to the
ingredient deck, and so thisperson took it upon themselves

(07:46):
to do some home dehydrationexperiments.
So they bought some awesomesauce.
They put it in a homedehydrator that you can go buy
it.
I was going to say Bed, bathBeyond, but where do we get
these from?
Now that company's out ofbusiness?

Speaker 3 (07:57):
I don't even know.
Look at me, I'm English.
And just to fill something in,this guy was trying to reverse
engineer the thing because it'slike $5 per, which is quite
expensive even in this market,this saturated market.
So he was trying to reverseengineer the stuff and make it
at home and he found itimpossible to get the calorie
and carbohydrate amounts fromthe listed ingredients right.

Speaker 1 (08:18):
Exactly, exactly.
So.
Just a curious person out therein the world Shout out to them.
Apparently they're a member ofthe ultra running community,
coached by some ultra runningcoaches, and started and kind of
posted their results on Reddit.
Here are the products that Igot.
I dehydrated them.
Here's what I got.
And then all of the people thatyou know think that they're
scientific experts start toweigh in.
Well, do the carbohydrates goaway after you dehydrate things?

(08:41):
And let me just be clear thatprocess of taking a product with
especially with a homogenousmacronutrient source,
dehydrating it and then weighingit and then multiplying it by
the known amount of calories pergram of that macronutrient
source, is actually a reasonableproxy.
I'm not saying it's a perfectproxy because you have other

(09:02):
things within that product, butwhen you have a product that's
predominantly like a steak,right Piece of beef, if you
completely dehydrate it, you'releft with all the protein that's
left.
Same thing with a carbohydrateproduct like an apple or a gel.
In this case, that's areasonable proxy.
Just to end that type ofspeculation.
It's not a perfect proxy, it'sa reasonable proxy.

(09:24):
So then, based off of that oneperson's experiments there was,
there were several others thatstarted to do this just with
this one awesome sauce product,and they all came in.
They all kind of coalescedaround the same amount of dried
weight, right around 16 to maybe19 grams of substance left in

(09:46):
one gel after they dehydrated it.
So you would think at thatpoint there are 17, 19 grams of
carbohydrates, since it'spredominantly a carbohydrate
product.
This is a really big differencefrom the claimed carbohydrate
content in an awesome sauce gel,which once again, is 45 grams
of carbohydrate.
So then the good folks over inGermany from Sport Hunger

(10:09):
actually decided to send it to alab.
They carry their kind ofanalogous to the feed here in
the US and in other areas of theworld where they have many
different nutrition products,and they sell them all over
Europe and personally I haveused them for both me and my
athletes over at UTMB.
When we run out of product orwe forget it or our luggage gets
lost or something, this guy,jonas, is a freaking wizard, all

(10:33):
of a sudden showing up at thelast minute with the exact thing
that you need and thequantities that you need, which
are a lot for endurance athletes, and I am forever grateful for
him personally and his companybailing me out and bail are a
lot for endurance athletes and Iam forever grateful for him him
personally and his companybailing me out and bailing a lot
of my elite athletes out whenwe run into these issues at the
very last minute at one of themost high profile races on the

(10:56):
planet.
So his company decided to sendit off to a lab in Germany and
they did approximate analysis inthis lab, which is kind of a
light version of a nutritionanalysis completely valid
version that anybody can use.
But they're kind of doing itfrom a cost savings perspective
and I'll go through that in asecond.
So he sent that.
He sent those in and he foundabout the same amount 18 grams

(11:18):
of carbohydrate or 17 grams ofcarbohydrate I can't remember
exactly what it was off the topof my head but right in line
with what the Redditors were,were dehydrating the products
too.
And so he decided to pull thatproduct off of his shelves and
started issuing refunds, andthis was four weeks ago.
You know we're now sitting herealmost in June, may 29th.

(11:38):
He started doing this three orfour weeks ago, long, long, long
, long time ago.
And it takes time to do theselab analysis takes three or four
weeks to actually get it done.
So he was on the ball instantlyand so I reached out to him,
had some dialogue with him and Isaid hey, what's going on here?
And he shared with me theresults.
As long as I wouldn't sharethem publicly and pass the
document around, that's hisright to do it.
So I looked at the results andI was like, hey, this is like,

(12:02):
this is legit.
Well, in the background, whatwas happening with all the
Reddit talk?
We had our coaching conferencein Arkansas.
Ruddy was there, all of ourcoaches were gathered up and it
was a topic of conversation andthere was enough sentiment in

(12:22):
the room and amongst theathletes that I worked with for
me to look at that and say Ineed to figure this out.
And so at some point, eitherduring or just after that
coaching conference I can'tremember what it was I started
to order products directly fromspring and directly from the
feed and have them sent to thislab up in Washington, uh, for
analysis, all the while waitingfor all these other, uh, all the

(12:44):
all these other, all the allthese other results to come back
.
And it just so happened thatthis week all the results
belatedly have finally come back.
So I got the first results kindof like last last week, I think
around Friday, waited until theMemorial day weekend was over
to kind of process it, and I gotthe second batch of results
just today, on Wednesday,wednesday May 29th.

(13:09):
Once again, all these recordsare freely available, freely
available on my website, and sohere we are.
That's the whole background ofthe story.
I had products analyzed.
Sport hunger over in Germanyhad products actually analyzed
in a lab.
There's another, there'sanother entity that gathered
some GoFundMe dollars that arealso doing proximate analysis
across a little bit of a broaderswath of nutrition products and
we could talk about that just alittle bit.

(13:30):
Those results will probablycome out right in line with this
podcast comes out.
So we're kind of blinded tothem as we speak right now.
But this whole saga brings up alot of different layers that I
wanted to get y'all's take on.
So in the room right now we gotSteph Howe, jim Rutberg and
Nick Tiller, who are all on myresearch group, and I thought

(13:51):
you know what.
We actually have a lot ofexpertise in the room to talk
about this.
We have people with nutritionbackgrounds, people who have
helped develop nutritionproducts at various stages of
development and at variousengagement levels of that
development from very involvedto not involved at all, and we
can kind of go through that inthat entirety.
We we have a Jim Rutberg who'san expert in communication and

(14:14):
can go through some of thecrisis communication pieces and
what we can learn from, from thepublic.
But I want to be clear that mygoal with this is not, to you
know, not to bash spring energyor not, to, you know, take down
a company or anything like that.
My goal is I want athletes tohave the right information and

(14:34):
the reason I sent these productsoff to a lab and this cost me a
lot of money.
This cost me four grand.
You know that's I have to thinkabout that.
You know that's not somethinglike flick it, flipping a nickel
to be.
I just wanted to know and I'mgetting kind of choked up here
because I'm thinking about it.
I've had athletes, professionalathletes use these exact
products and I'm holding HillAid and Canterbury up right now.

(14:57):
These are two of the ones that Italked about and had absolutely
horrible races and they wouldcome into an aid station with
nothing but empty wrappers sothey'd nailed their nutrition
plan as we had drawn it up,completely annihilated, slam a
Coke and be great for 20 minutesand then come into the next aid

(15:20):
station with all empty wrappers, all spring empty wrappers, and
be completely annihilated.
And after the race and afterthe failure of a race that
several of those were I'mstylizing several stories kind
of all at once, but I'm thinkingof one in particular.
We would go back to the drawingboard and I would take
responsibility for something andusually it's the programming,
because that's what I'm anexpert at.

(15:41):
We got this wrong.
We did these intervals wrong.
This is the wrong load.
Something went wrong in thetraining to cause this poor
result, and it makes me sick tomy stomach that a professional
athlete who's pouring their gutsout every single day for months
and years in training getstheir races unwound because of a

(16:04):
product that is not what itappears to be, and I own a
little bit of thatresponsibility.
I should have had a more clearvision and thinking that could
have been a problem becauseeverything else was good, the
training leading up to the racewas good, all these other things
.
I never thought for one secondthat the products that some of

(16:25):
these athletes were consuming atthe highest level, trying to
compete at the highest level hadhalf or 60% of the carbohydrate
content which athletesabsolutely rely on to fuel.
It never even crossed my mind,and I feel like a freaking idiot
for it, not earlier than now.
So I wanted to find out thatthat whole story, that whole
monologue, is just an elaborateway of saying.

(16:46):
I just wanted to find out.
I wanted to get to the bottom ofit because I wanted to know for
sure yes, you can continue totake these products or no, let's
switch over to something else.
Because they liked them,they're good on their stomach,
they could take in three or fourper hour right To get their,
you know, the correctcarbohydrate content, as we
thought it was.
And I didn't want to switchfrom that because if you think

(17:06):
you're taking in that much, thatmany calories and if it ain't
broke, you don't have any GIdistress, that's something that
you kind of hold onto.
So that's the background of whyI wanted to do this, why I
plunked down my own money to doit and why I wanted to get to
the bottom of it.
It's not to take down a company, it's to make things right for
the athletes.
So that's the backdrop.

(17:27):
I'm going to take a little bitof a breather right now, because
I need to.
I think the first thing that wewant to talk about, outside of
the lab results, once again kindof freely available on my
website, is I want to go aroundthe room a little bit before we
get too tactical and I just wantto know y'all's you've been
following this through thecontent that's out there and

(17:48):
also through our internaldialogue just some initial
thoughts that you have on thiswhole saga and why we're here
right here.
Nick, we'll start with youbecause you're probably the
biggest brainiac and have beenable to process this the best
out of all of us.

Speaker 3 (18:03):
Well, even though I am not particularly shocked at
the findings from the labresults, the fact that these
products don't have the statedamounts on the label, but
different to what was actuallycontained in the thing I'm not
super shocked at that becausethere's little to no.
I mean, my whole professionalwork over the last decade has

(18:25):
been talking about how there'slittle to no regulation in
health and wellness or indietary supplements, and so
something will only actually beclosely scrutinized or taken off
the market when there'sevidence of harm, and in this
case there probably is evidenceof harm.
So I'm not super surprised.
But the fact that thediscrepancy is that big, so I'm
not super surprised.
But the fact that thediscrepancy is that big, you

(18:45):
know, like in the US and Canadayou have about a 20% tolerance
up a lower limit.
So whatever stated on the label, you're allowed to be 20%
standard deviation of that,which I think is quite generous,
but we're talking about 40, 50%difference here, which is

(19:20):
really unacceptable.
And I guess my first thoughtwas.
My second thought was theperformance thing was that
athletes are potentially puttingtheir lives on the line.
I don't think it's anoverstatement to say that people
are putting their lives on theline when they go out and do
these long trail races, andthey're out there performing for
hours and hours on end.
And when people get theirnutrition wrong, they end up in
hospital often.

(19:40):
And here you've got athleteswho, with your help and with the
help help of nutritionists, arenailing their nutritional
strategy and they're gettinghalf the amount of calories,
half the amount of carbohydrate,and this is how you end up
hyperglycemic.
What if you have a diabeticrunners, which is not uncommon.
Small percentage of runners arediabetic.
They rely, absolutely depend ontheir nutrition to keep them

(20:05):
conscious.
So my second thought was thelost performances.
My first thought was the riskto athlete health and welfare.
And it's infuriating becausewhether this was deliberately
undercutting the product or justa complete series of know, a
series of systematic mistakes onbehalf of the company, is

(20:29):
completely unacceptable.
So my so yeah, angry andfrustrated, I guess, is my first
response really well put nick.

Speaker 1 (20:35):
That's why I wanted to start with you, and everybody
has to follow that.
Stephanie, you get to go next.
I mean, I know you're gonnahave a kind of a particular
nutrition angle on this.

Speaker 4 (20:43):
Yeah, I mean I echo what Nick said of I'm not
surprised that it was low, but Iwas surprised it was that much
different than what it showed onthe package.
That to me was wow, and evenmore so across the board with
all three of the gels analyzed.
That was really telling.

(21:04):
And I come at it from a lens ofboth an athlete and as someone
in the nutrition profession andI am shocked, I am frustrated, I
am pissed and because ofreasons you both already brought
up, working with athletesdialing in their nutrition plans

(21:24):
and not just in the race.
That matters right.
If they think they're getting90 grams an hour by taking two
gels and they're actuallygetting like 40, that's a big
problem.
That's half of what they thinkthey're getting.
And we know the recommendationsfor me Well for anyone who
looks at like what are therecommendations for endurance

(21:45):
performance 60 grams minimum perhour.
So there's that piece.
But then there's also the pieceof training, the gut.
If you're using these productsin your training and you think
you can tolerate 90 grams perhour but turns out it's actually
only 40, that's a bigdisconnect to if you get into a

(22:06):
race situation and you're tryingto take other products, maybe
the race is sponsored by adifferent nutrition company and
you know you can tolerate thatupper limit.
So you think that's going toblow up.
You're going to have GI issuesand back to the drawing board of
like what went wrong, to thedrawing board of like what went
wrong and it you know it's.

(22:27):
It would be impossible topinpoint that.
So I feel very misled and, asan athlete like I personally
don't use that product but likefor other other peers, like I'm
upset for them.
I know people who use theproduct and have had like
nutrition debacles and it didn'tmake any sense.
But now, kind of you know,things are falling together and

(22:47):
I think we need to be reallyclear and transparent with this
and not try to tiptoe around.
The issue of like this is a bigoversight and we'll probably
get into that a little more.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
Yeah, I want to.
I kind of want to like, comeback to that big issue piece.
Just a bit stuff before we goon to you ready.
I'm not alleging that theseproducts have the carbohydrate
and the calorie content that Ijust mentioned at the beginning.
I'm not alleging that at all.
I'm saying that when I sentthem to a lab they actually had

(23:20):
that content.
So don't get it twisted, don'tget it twisted.
Don't get it twisted.
Don't get it twisted.
Don't get it mistaken.
I'm not thinking or whatever.
This is my friend's anecdote ormy other buddy's story or
whatever.
I actually ordered theseproducts as a normal customer,
through normal means of purchase.
That's why I bought them fromthe spring, from spring directly

(23:42):
and from the feed, throughnormal means of purchase, and I
had them sent to a professionalnutrition chemistry lab with
actual nutrition chemists thereto analyze the results.
And this is what actually camethrough.
So if we hear any morehyperbole in the rest of the
space around, well, allegedlythis and allegedly that, listen,

(24:05):
I had these products, Ipurchased these products just as
a normal person.
This is not alleged anymore.
Now I can't say for theentirety of Spring's existence,
right, they've been a nutritioncompany for nearly a decade and
who knows how their formulaskind of moved around over the
years and things like that.
But this is a really big miss.
Let's be honest.
Let's be honest with each other.
These are not allegationsanymore.

(24:26):
This piece of it actual theanalysis and the quantifiable
macronutrient content of theseproducts is an actual, not a
theoretical anymore.
Okay, you can go, you can takea different angle on this.
Since we've talked aboutnutrition and science a little
bit, yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
So from the communication standpoint, I've
watched this with a tendency togive companies and brands the
benefit of the doubt, as long asyou can really, because
communications issues like thisare really problematic and
touchy, problematic and touchy.

(25:07):
You have the Reddit communityor you have a population out
there with thousands of peoplewho all have comments and
opinions and make statements,and you're one brand and have
one voice and you have to try toanswer all of that.
So initially I was prettyforgiving of the fact that they
were pretty quiet, because ifyou're in one of those
situations, you really have toget your ducks in a row, not in

(25:28):
the sense of getting your storystraight, but in terms of
figuring out what the facts are.
You don't want to rush to aconclusion and say we made a
mistake, this, we did that, andthen have to backtrack.
You do need to be patient alittle bit.
But when they were continuallyquiet and they didn't do
anything, they started to losesome of that credibility or you

(25:52):
started to really wonder andthink well, they're kind of
making a communications errorfrom a crisis standpoint and now
they're in trouble.
You know, I think that it'swhen you have more products that
come out that are showing thesame thing and there's no
response from the company.
It's problematic People, I willsay, if there were errors and

(26:13):
they were quick about finding itand correcting it and handling
it from a communicationstandpoint.
Consumers are pretty forgivingof brands that mess up.
Consumers are pretty forgivingof brands that mess up, but
they're not forgiving of brandsthat are either doing things
purposely- and brands that aresort of negligent about taking

(26:34):
care of their customers.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
I want to clarify something just for the sake of
transparency.
We're going to come back to thecommunications piece of it just
in a second, but once again,we're recording this on
Wednesday, may 29th.
This will probably come out onFriday or maybe even the
following Monday, depending uponwhen my post-production gets to
it.
There's always a delay becauseI always do post-production

(27:08):
results to the CEO of Springdirectly, telling him the exact
storyline.
This is what I did.
This is where I bought these.
Here are the results.
He has now had that for at leasta day and I'm not going to
blame people for not jumping onemails.
I've got 400 emails in my inboxand it takes me a few days to
respond, but I wanted to makethat part crystal clear.
At this point.
He does not have the Canterburyand the Hill Aid email.

(27:29):
I have not sent that yet, as weare recording this right now.
So I want the audience tounderstand that for perspective,
that between the time that werecord this and we actually
release it, some part of thiscommunications piece might have
transpired and be just a littlebit different.
So please keep that timeline inmind, as you guys are all
listening to this.

Speaker 2 (27:49):
Sure, but the issue started coming up four, four
plus weeks ago, if not longerlonger than that.
So if you're a brand, you're,you have your ear to what the
market is saying and what isbeing said about your company
and there should have been a.
They knew something washappening at that time and you

(28:09):
have to decide as a brand andthere are certain things that,
as a brand or as a company, thatyou do let slide, that you know
, if it's a an issue that peoplehave with your company or
something like that, that reallyisn't core to the values of the
company and what you're tryingto do, etc.
And it's just somethingtangential.
Yeah, sometimes just let itslide, let it fade away, but

(28:31):
when it's core to what you do,you have to pay attention.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
Like the core carbohydrate content of three of
your most popular products.
I hate to laugh at it, but Imean, that's really what it is.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
If the values of your company are to fuel performance
and there's a problem withfueling the ability of your
product to fuel performance,then yeah, here the problem is
striking right at the core ofwhat you're theoretically, what
your values are as a brand.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
Okay, we're going to come back to the PR piece, right
?
I appreciate that from yourperspective because you've
definitely lived it over thelast several years.
I want to start with one pieceof our collective kind of
expertise that we can throw onthe table, and that's how do
products get developed.
None of us are in the trenches,so to speak, owning a nutrition

(29:19):
company, right?
However, all of us have hadexperience helping nutrition
companies develop product, andthat experience ranges from just
a little bit I gave him an ideaand I taste tested it to a
whole heck of a lot, doing allthe scientific background,
research, kind of getting in thetrenches with the registered

(29:40):
dietitians and the sportsnutritionists and the food
chemists and things like that.
And, stephanie, since you've got, like, the most experience here
, I kind of want to go overfirst, like what is your
experience, so that the we cankind of set that table correctly
, because what's going to happenbecause of this is what had

(30:01):
happened, right, what actuallyhappened.
How did this mistake actuallykind of kind of get unrolled?
And I want the listeners tokind of understand what goes on
behind the scenes in order tokind of process that a little
bit more when information doescome out.
So, steph, I'll turn that kindof the floor back over to you
and your experience.
Let's just go over that andthen how these products actually

(30:22):
end up coming to light.

Speaker 4 (30:23):
Yeah, I had experience working with Clif Bar
for about a decade and I workedwith them as an athlete and
then also I had a professionalcontract with them as an
independent contractor to doresearch.
Anytime they wanted to learnabout, like specific nutrients
or what the current literaturewas in sports nutrition, they

(30:45):
would contract with someone inthe field.
So I was that person for andnot just me there was like a
cohort of us for a few yearswhere they would say, hey, we
want to find out about thesefive micronutrients.
Can you come back with a deepdive on the literature?
And this would be a projectthat would take usually they'd
give me three months to do itand so I would like dive through

(31:07):
all the literature, come upwith a summary, put it all in a
spreadsheet and then we would gothrough it.
It wasn't just like a quickturnaround, so it was very
detailed and this wasn'tnecessarily like product
development.
This was just them gatheringinformation about the sports
nutrition literature.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
Like what you wanted in the product, the sports
nutrition literature.
Like what you wanted in theproduct Like do you want like a
branch chain amino acid in it,or do you want sodium citrate
versus sodium chloride?
That kind of stuff, right.

Speaker 4 (31:33):
Exactly so.
It was like all of those thingsthat were just like hot topics,
buzzwords, things that werecoming up, like branch chain
amino acids or one of them,caffeine, was something they
would revisit beetroot, whenthat was kind of a thing.
So it was like looking at allof these things that may
potentially impact performancethat you might want to include
in a product and then reviewing,like the sports nutrition

(31:55):
literature, like what are theguidelines for carbohydrate?
What is the peer reviewedliterature on this topic, and so
that was, like you know, areally cool experience to be on
the professional side and thenon the athlete side, I was also
involved and that was more of ataste test, like these are some
sample products we have createdbased on that.

(32:16):
Like you know, there's a chainof events and how this starts
like, with the you know,learning about the literature
and what's out there, to theinternal team meeting, to
research and development,starting to play around in the
lab, to getting these sampleproducts, and this isn't on the
tune to days to weeks, this ismonths to years.

(32:39):
And, as an athlete, the productdevelopment piece looked like
tasting a bunch of differentproducts.
Usually they were like, I mean,sort of blind taste tests of
like.
You know, all in a whitepackage.
You rate them on many differentthings.
We would take videos or meet ona Zoom call and go through all
of it Like what do you like?
What do you dislike?

(32:59):
What about the taste?
What about like?
It was very intensive andusually by the end of that that
information was taken back to RDand sometimes it may be
translated into in a product,but this again was months to
years down the line.

Speaker 1 (33:14):
And how many, like with the taste testing piece of
it.
You kind of described youracademic cohort right.
It's several people, like weall need to figure out if we're
going to put brand change aminoacids in this Right, but with
the taste testing cohort, cohortlike, how many people are
actually involved in that?

Speaker 4 (33:29):
so in the group I was in there were, I think, eight
athletes like within that thecouple year, it was like a
three-year period that we didthis, and I mean there were
other groups that did differenttypes of products, so this was
like the endurance group, soseveral of us and is there
anything else like within thatwhole like product development

(33:50):
timeline that, like, I mean, thething that strikes me as being
like really remarkable is justthe length.

Speaker 1 (33:56):
Right, there's like several steps, there's multiple
steps, there's multiple teamsinvolved, there's multiple
people within those multipleteams and, you know, chain after
chain eventually kind of getslinked together and at the end
of the day it might hopefullygets turned into a product.

Speaker 4 (34:10):
Yeah, to me it was just like really behind the
scenes of like how much workgoes into developing a product,
from gathering the research tolike creating a product with
like numbers, turning numbersinto food and then turning it
into something that's going tohelp performance and that's
going to taste good and bepresentable.
Like that is not an easyprocess and there's redundancies

(34:32):
on redundancies to make surethat there's good quality
control across the board.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
So, nick, you've had some experience in this as well.
You want to chime in on any ofthose pieces?

Speaker 3 (34:43):
Well, there's something I want to just touch
on, just with regards to theproduct development stage,
because I wasn't involved at allwith product development.
The experience that I have wasfor two years, during and just
after my master's.
This is going back some yearsnow over a decade I was involved
in research related to sportsnutrition products, specifically

(35:05):
the development of carbohydrateproducts for two different
companies that shall remainnameless for now, but so I'll
talk about my specificexperiences actually doing
applied research and publishableresearch on these new products.
But there's just a couple ofthings just in terms of like,
just basic deductive reasoningthat relates to the development
process of these products.

(35:26):
So, number one, the fact thatwe've based on the data that you
got back from the labs, it'snot just Awesome Sauce that has
the calorie and carbohydratedeficit, right.
There are multiple productswithin from the same company
that seem to have the same issue, which shows which suggests to
me that there is a systemicproblem with the way that
they're developing their product.

(35:47):
So clearly they use the samecarbohydrate formula.
Everything comes from the samebig, you know, soup bowl or
whatever of of carbohydrate goo,and then they and then it's not
like they're developing awesomesauce separately, right, so
everything's being developedcentrally.
They have core ingredients thatthe products share the core

(36:08):
ingredients and the core processis obviously the same, and then
they're adding the flavors andthe colors and everything else
to make the different products.
So there's obviously a systemicproblem there.
And the other thing is thatthere are a bunch of other red
flags, like lab results aside.
If you go into the detail onthe Reddit thread, you notice
that people were saying thatthey weren't as full after

(36:30):
having two or three gels, whennormally, if they were getting
90 grams of carbohydrate an hour, that would keep them going,
both energetically and in termsof satiety, they'd be fine.
And they were finding that theycould take in much more than
they otherwise could.
And the fact that the stuff isquite watery like it's almost

(36:50):
like a water-based gel.
And actually for something thatis 45 grams of carbohydrate per
54 grams of gel, you'd expectit to be very viscous, almost
like toothpaste or frosting.
In England we'd call it likeicing sugar.
It would be very thick and somegels are very thick.
Goo, chocolate outrage.
Goo's a thick gel, right,exactly Because it's got a high

(37:12):
carbohydrate content.
So for something with this kindof carbohydrate content, you'd
expect it you wouldn't expect itto be as kind of watery and as
liquidy as it is.
So that's like another red flag, and it's just amazing that
people in the development phaseof the product weren't thinking
these things through.
I mean, spring claimed to bescientists and nutritionists and

(37:34):
athletes first and foremostright.
Well, if you read the Redditthread, you have athletes who
are highlighting these red flagsfor themselves and that's what,
yeah.
And people with PhDs forthemselves and that's what, yeah
.
And people with PhDs, and soit's things that are.
This is why they decided totest the product themselves to

(37:55):
begin with, because they werenoticing these inconsistencies.
So there's obviously a systemicissue with the way that this
product is being developed.

Speaker 1 (38:00):
So, nick, what you just articulated, that whole run
of show, is basically why Iwanted to send it off to a lab,
because all of these differentpoints kind of just didn't make
sense to me.
I mean, I remember being atthis coaching conference talking
with several coaches and theywere just yeah, I had this
athlete that nailed theirnutrition plan but frigging
bogged here, and I've noticedthat from this batch to this

(38:24):
batch of this one, you know, gel, there's inconsistency just
within the texture, right, youknow, there's just something
that they had, something thatthey had noticed.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
All of those things, spring has noticed this.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Assumingly.
I mean you know they make a bit.
They make a really big deal ontheir social media about how
rigorous their testing is andthings like that, Not
indifferent to any other company.
But maybe they need to kind ofrethink that.
There's this other element ofproduct development, and the
picture that I'm trying to paintis, normally when you do this
product development stuff,there's all these different
pieces of it, and Ruddy and Ihave been involved to this in

(38:58):
varying degrees.
And, ruddy, actually I pulledup a list for us and you're
going to have to double check meas I go through this.
So Ruddy and I have both beenin the endurance space for 25
years now.
So when you've been doing itfor that long, you kind of have
worked with everybody.
And so along the way we haveworked with the following

(39:19):
nutrition companies in varyingcapacities power bars, endurance
and recovery drink, osmosdrinks and hyperhydration drinks
.
Secret drink mix before itbecame scratch labs, I actually
used that during the only yearthat I ran bad water.
I got a little batch of it.
I was so proud I you know thisis a new flavor for us.

(39:42):
It had a little foil package onit with the red X and so anyway
.
So secret drink, mix and orscratch labs, we could take care
of that if we wanted to.
Pro bars, both on their boltline, which still exists, in
their fuel line, which sadlydoesn't exist anymore.
I thought that was a goodproduct.
Goo, specifically with theirrock tank drink product and
their chomps product as well,and then fluid hydration on both

(40:05):
our hydration product as wellas their recovery product, and
I'm probably missing a few more,but that's a lot of nutrition
companies and I'm going to givethe whole range of involvement
and then running.
I'm going to throw it over toyou from kind of the most
intimate level of involvement tothe least intimate level of
involvement.

(40:25):
So the most intimate level ofinvolvement was with Power Bar.
So this is when Asgard, jukeand Droop was working over there
, working for Nestle in fact,and they did not have a product
in this space, they did not havean endurance, they did not have
like an endurance drink, nordid they have a recovery drink,
and so they contacted us kind ofwith a twofold premise is one,

(40:47):
we want you guys to help us comeup with the formulation of the
drink and then two, we want you,cts, as a company, to help
endorse the drink simultaneously, which is a cool storyline.
Right, we're going to help youcome up with it.
We don't have it before.
Power Bar had a great legacy atthe time.
You guys remember the gold foilbars that people would stick on
their handlebars kind of backin the day, and they were
impossible to eat and would tearout your fillings and things

(41:09):
like that.
They were trying to move awayfrom that into something a
little bit more scientific andso we jumped at the opportunity.
One of our coaches who has agreat science background, dean
Golich, kind of led up thisprogram and he met with Powerbar
endlessly to determine all thethings that Stephanie was just
going through with theirresearch group what kind of
carbohydrate we wanted.
What kind of sodium contentcontent we wanted at 8%

(41:31):
carbohydrate solution, becauseat the time 8% was all of the
rage and now we've morphed fromthat to other percentages or
more specific use cases.
What was the right protein tocarbohydrate ratio that we
wanted in the recovery productspecifically, and where did we
want that protein?
What type of protein did weactually want to put in that?

(41:52):
Then we would get samples andthen we would test those samples
and we distributed them to ourathletes at our camps and how
did they taste?
And we'd roll that you knowtaste testing kind of back up
and then go back to theformulation game.
On and on and on.
And well, we can't take creditfor every single step of the
process.
That was an intimaterelationship because it took
like 12 months, maybe 18 monthsfrom, from my memory, and we had

(42:15):
multiple people involved,multiple coaches involved at
kind of like multiple stepsobviously not all of the steps,
because their chief scienceofficer was the renowned Asker
Jukendrup, but something that Ithink we can kind of say listen,
we lent a pretty big hand inactually developing this.
The opposite of that and I'mnot saying that these are good
and bad, but I'm saying the kindof polar opposite of that level

(42:38):
of involvement was what I'llsay.
What we had with Goo is afantastic partner.
I always loved working withBrian Vaughn, their CEO, and
he's like the second in linefounder at the time.
He's just a really great guy towork with.
Before Magda took over theoperations, he's just as
fantastic.
And they were just trying tocome out with their Roctane
product at the time.

(42:59):
So we signed this wholenutrition deal with them.
We had access to all of theirproducts, which at the time was
primarily gel and what theycalled goo to oh, remember that
name way back in the day, theirelectrolyte drink, and they were
trying to come up with a highercarbohydrate drink product that
they were going to call rockTane, which would be analogous
to their kind of super jet fuelgel at the time, a rock Tane gel

(43:21):
.
And so during this entirenutrition partnership, they sent
us some initial batches ofRoctane to our offices, probably
200 or 300 cans worth, and Ispecifically remember the fruit
punch tasting like battery acidbecause they were trying to
cover up.
They couldn't figure out how tocover up the amount of caffeine
that they were trying to do it.

(43:42):
So that was our feedback, thatwe rolled back into it, but we
so anyway.
So that was a partnership thatwas predominantly based off of
taste testing and distributingit to our athletes through our
camps and things like that.
And ready, I'm actually goingto pull up.
Which is how we found out thatit wouldn't dissolve in water
either, exactly, which isexactly how we found out it
wouldn't dissolve in water.

(44:16):
Not easily Like it, would?
It clumped, and all that kindof stuff, for the same kind of
reasons as I do that, ruddy, buyme a little bit of time and can
you kind of like re-encapsulatesome of these other
relationships that we havemainly from like a breadth
standpoint?

Speaker 2 (44:39):
Yeah, I mean a lot of them were straight endorsement
deals in the sense of we wereable to give a brand reach to
our athletes, do some tastetesting.
We knew that the products fitthe philosophy that we had from
a nutrition standpoint and, asyou said, from a taste testing
standpoint.
We had enough coaches andenough athletes coming to camps
that we could achieve tastetesting at a scale that was

(45:05):
difficult at the time.
The coaching profession wasn'twhat it is now, back then in the
sense of you didn't haveorganizations that had as many
athletes and as many camps andthings like that.
So we were a good resource forcompanies to be able to get to
coaches and athletes at areasonable scale to use products

(45:26):
long enough with a high enoughvolume.
I mean you can't taste testsomething or product test
something that's a nutritionproduct by giving somebody two
gels and having them say yay ornay, it has to be used for a
period of time, it has to beused at a camp that's a week
long, those kinds of things.
So we were a good resource forthat.

(45:46):
And then, as you're going tobring up, we were always careful
about the language that weagreed upon for how that was
going to be described.
We weren't making, oh, weweren't.
Not only were we not makingoutlandish claims about what the
thing could do, but we didn'tallow the companies and it was
not allow.

(46:07):
But we didn't allow thecompanies and it was not allow.
It was more of the mutuallyagreed upon language, wasn't
putting us in a position ofclaiming something that we
shouldn't claim.
Nor was the company that thenutrition company putting word
in our mouth and saying you know, cts says this about it.
Like there was a goodcommunication back and forth

(46:27):
with what we felt comfortablewith him saying and what we were
comfortable with the productdelivering, so I'll read.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
I'm just going to read one paragraph of this press
release, just to save theaudience.
Ruddy, this is your handiwork,by the way.
Maybe I should make you read it, just so it's in your voice.
I'll let you off the hook.
So, here's the one paragraphthat Ruddy was alluding to and
then I'll expand upon that.
The two companies will worktogether to maximize
opportunities to educateathletes and proper sports
nutrition.
Goo, the market leading energygel manufacturer, will provide

(47:00):
products to all CTS coaches,camps and clinics for their
growing array of sportsperformance nutrition offerings.
These include original gooenergy gel.
Rock taint, ultra enduranceenergy gel.
Goo 2-0 electrolyte drinkthat's how I could remember that
name and the soon to belaunched chomps energy chew.
So this kind of dates the pressrelease right Before they

(47:22):
actually came out with chompsand they didn't even mention the
rock taint drink.
And my point with kind of likebringing this part of it up and
using Steph's example as part ofthe lead in, is coaches and
athletes will piggyback on thisprocess of product development
in varying capacities.
Some of those capacities arevery intimate, where they're

(47:43):
getting in the weeds, like Stephjust mentioned.
We're going to go and we'regoing to do the research and
things like that, and some ofthem are taste testing, which is
a lot of the, a lot of theproduct.
Ambassadors are kind ofutilized for that very specific
purpose.
We have this big, broad arrayof product of ambassadors.
We're going to send them outnew flavors and ask them what
they think about it and they'repart of the development curve

(48:05):
and one of the storylines kindof along this is I do think that
we need to be very careful ascoaching professionals and
athletes as professionalathletes stating how they work
with various companies and beinghonest and authentic in those
statements, because there aremany and multiple people

(48:25):
involved in it.
And whenever I've had an athleteand I have had athletes that
have been through this processand they go through some version
of creating like a signatureproduct, it doesn't have to be a
nutrition product, it can be apack.
You guys remember the packsthat ultimate direction actually
made in the day and I just nowremember this is a good example

(48:46):
where it's literally theirsignature on the deal.
You better be as intimatelyinvolved in that as possible and
shout out.
It all comes back to TonyKapryczka, who's the original
person to do this with a pack.
We're going to bring it out innutrition.
He was actually in ultimatedirection every single day,
saying I want this and I don'twant that, and I want this and I
don't want that and I hate thisand make this orange and things

(49:07):
like that, and sure he probablydidn't get a hundred percent
what he actually wanted.
But the reason that pack endedup like it was, and why I think
this is a great example of anauthentic relationship, is
because he was so invested inthe product and making it
exactly for him.
Now that has drawbacks, becauseonce you make something for one
person, it's hard to then sellit to tens or hundreds of

(49:29):
thousands of people.
But I'm using it as an example.
That is outside of thenutrition world where some of
these partnerships can be reallyintimate and authentic.
So I think a learning lessonwith all of this is during this
development process, the publicneeds to realize that there are
multiple people involved atmultiple steps and no single one

(49:50):
of them can kind of claimcredit for the origin of the
product.
And it still is kind ofremarkable to me, to Nick's
point, that there are stillthese drastic errors considering
how product development shouldgo in the first place.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
However, you know.
Coming back to some of thepartnerships that we had over
the years with all thosenutrition companies, we didn't,
as part of those partnerships,send their products off to an
independent lab either.
Yeah, that's true At the time.
So we never sent goo off, toadmit, to verify that they had
what they said they had.
However, as part of the producttesting that we were doing for

(50:28):
them, if the performance thatpeople had while taking it, if
we noticed that something wasn'tgoing as predicted, we're
giving people the recommendedamount and the performances are
not coming up to how we wouldexpect, that would have been
feedback that we would havegiven back to the companies.

Speaker 1 (50:48):
Yeah, well, and actually that's a really
important part of the feedbackloop, right, like when you're
tied to it, and part of being ina partnership is rolling that
feedback up, right.
So if you're continuallytesting it and you're
continually using it amongstyour athlete group which we had
a big athlete group to work withat the time, we had over 2000
athletes, over 500 athletescoming through our camp.

(51:09):
Products which destroyed theseproducts, I mean, ruddy, you
remember like how many justhundreds and hundreds of gels
and cans of drink mix and thingslike that that we blow through
during these seven day long,really intensive, you know,
endurance camps.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
We had a lot of product testing and that's why
it was so effective for thecompanies Exactly At the time
there was really very there wasnot as an opportunity to do that
.
You couldn't.
People say, well, you could dotaste testing at races, but not
in the same way.
Like, you're not going to getfeedback from the people it's

(51:48):
not as we weren't ascientifically controlled group
but if you have athletes for aweek using tons of the product
and you're getting the feedbackfrom how they performed during
the week, especially when thethe hyper hydration one, when we
did, when we were using that,it was in Torre California one
of the years that it wasextraordinarily hot and we got
some good feedback on forathletes for whom it worked,

(52:08):
athletes for whom it didn't work, what conditions it was.
A good use case for all of thatkind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
Well, and the companies won it.
I just remember this greatexample.
So the one year we're now past,memorial Day weekend famous
Western States Memorial Daytraining camp goes on, and one
of the things that makes thistraining camp so iconic is that
they set up all the aid stationsjust like they would, or at
least close to the actual race.
And at the time that I did thisthe only time that I did it Goo

(52:38):
was our nutrition partner, andGoo was also the nutrition
partner for the Western States100.
And I was running the WesternStates 100.
So perfect, right, I get myrace day nutrition out on the
course and I get to practice itduring the training camp on the
course with the actual aidstations Like what a great setup
.
And I went through the camp andI was going to use their

(52:59):
blueberry pomegranateelectrolyte drink because I
really liked the flavor andthat's what they were going to
have on course.
So everything is lining up.
So I go out there and I gothrough the first couple of aid
stations and I'm like this justtastes weird, it kind of like
tastes like it tastes light.
And then finally, on the verylast day, we go through three
days of this, all the same drink, all the same flavor.

(53:22):
At the very last aid station, Iasked one of the volunteers,
why does this taste so light?
And she goes well, we mixed itat half strength and I was like,
well, well, why?
And she said, well, theinstruction manual told us to.
They actually had a volunteerinstruction manual and I read it
right there at the aid stationblah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, mix this at halfstrength.

(53:43):
This goo you know they come inthe big bags when you're using
them for like eight stations andthings like that, as opposed to
the cans that you can buy inthe store.
Mix this into five gallonsinstead of two, and instead of
two for five gallons, mix thisone, five gallons.
Very deliberate instruction,and I was absolutely floored,
and so I, immediately after thecamp was over, I called Brian
Vaughn, their CEO, and I toldhim that story and he was

(54:04):
totally irate.
So, once again, it's an exampleof partnering with a company
that has a big footprint, that'sat all of these types of events
, going through these things,gathering feedback about how
their products are actuallybeing used, and this is no
disrespect to the volunteers orWestern States or anything like
that.
I don't know how this errorkind of happened.
But that's the feedback thatthe companies actually want from

(54:25):
their indoor, from the peoplethat are endorsing their product
, the people that partner withthem and the coaches and the
athletes that actually use them.
They want to be out in thefield to see how it's actually
going in real time.

Speaker 4 (54:37):
One thing you were mentioning that I think is a
good place to make a distinctionis the difference between an
athlete who is developing aproduct and someone who is a
professional in the field andworking with athletes.
Because I think when you are aprofessional, you have to in
some ways be brand neutral interms of like recommending

(54:58):
what's best for your athletes,and you have to have integrity.
So, partnering with specificbrands, you can use that for
your personal self as an athlete, but when you are recommending
products to brands, you can usethat for your personal self as
an athlete, but when you arerecommending products to
athletes, you have to be surewhat you're recommending is
based on science and not basedon personal opinions.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
It's.
We were talking about this kindof offline, the scientific.
Nick, I kind of want you tochime in this, since you're
close to the scientificcommunity, much closer than I am
.
They're kind of having an issuewith this right now because the
science communicators that havereally big platforms they're
starting to take endorsementdeals from mainly from
supplement companies and it kindof puts them they can make a

(55:41):
lot of money from it.
Let's be honest, like they, ifthey have a signature product or
a signature constellation ofproducts which is really popular
right now with, like thehuuberman Lab and things like
that, that's a really lucrativeopportunity for them.
But to Steph's point, there'sstill some scientific integrity
that a lot of the people in theacademic community kind of have

(56:02):
viewed.
It's not sour grapes, butthey're viewing it with a very
kind of critical lens.
So so, nick, I wonder if youcan kind of opine on that aspect
a little bit well, industry hasbeen funding scientific
research for decades.

Speaker 3 (56:13):
I mean there are a couple of really big analyses
now more recently that haveshown that sports nutrition,
that funded sports nutritionresearch, is much more likely to
produce statisticallysignificant results.
The nutrition research thatisn't industry funded, right?
Well, no shit, I mean thatmakes sense because there's an
internal bias there.

(56:34):
We wish that there weren't, butthere is.
That's just how the world worksand industry has been funding
nutrition research for decades.
But it's happening more andmore now and I think we've got
to be realistic because if therewere no industry funding at all
, then there'd be very littleresearch.
I mean, if you just look at howmany clinical trials that drug

(56:57):
companies fund, and that doesn'tinherently mean that the
results are flawed or invalid.
You just have to havesafeguards in place so that you
can do the study the way thatyour lab, the way that you and
your lab want to do the study,that you can do it independently
and that you pre-register thetrial and then publish the
results.

(57:17):
Whatever the results say, andin most cases, certainly in the
clinical world, there aresafeguards in place so that even
if you do a study and theresults are relatively
unfavorable for a particulardrug, the study still gets
published and then, okay, well,the drug doesn't work, let's
move on and look at somethingelse, right?
So in most cases there aresafeguards in place With sports

(57:39):
nutrition research.
The vast majority of thesestudies, because they're done in
exercise science labs andsports nutrition labs, they're
not pre-registered.
So if you do a study and youfind you know, maybe it's an
expensive study and you findthat a particular product
doesn't work, you don't have topublish it.
You should.

(58:00):
And if you have good scientific, good intellectual integrity,
you'll still publish the thingand you'll just present results
as they are.
But a lot of the time it's notuncommon for industry to try and
suppress particular resultsbecause they're unfavorable.
And this is what we call thefile draw problem.
It's this idea that resultsthat are not statistically

(58:22):
significant are just put in thefile drawer and then they close
the drawer and you forget aboutit and it's never published.
And there's more and moreanalysis showing this sort of
publication bias, in thatthere's a lot of studies being,
there's a lot more positivestudies being published than
you'd expect to see if there wasno bias, if you understand what

(58:43):
I'm saying.
So I think that's an importantthing to remember.
And just a couple of anecdotes.
Look, as I said, when I wasdoing my master's and just
following my master's, I workedwith two different sports
nutrition companies, neither ofwhich was spring.
So I just I hasten to add thatthey're nothing to do with this,
but that there were two quickanecdotes that I want to share
with you.
One of them was we were doing avery basic study to test this

(59:05):
new carbohydrate formulationthat had been developed by this
company, and this was back in2007, 2008.
So this was right at thebeginning of the two to one
carbohydrate ratio.
This is when most of theresearch on two to one glucose
fructose formulations was sortof coming out in 2004, 2005.

(59:25):
A lot of it was done by AskerUkendrup and some of his
colleagues, and so around 2005,6, 7, you got a lot of nutrition
companies who were jumping onthe bandwagon to get their
product out there, and so wewere testing this relatively new
two-to-one carbohydrateglucose-to-fructose carbohydrate
sports drink, and we weretesting it against the closest

(59:46):
competitors in the field.
Again, I'm not going to tellyou which company it was, so I
don't think it's fair, but wetested it in six individuals
only and we were like halfwaythrough we were trying to
recruit 12 because we were usingisotope labeling.
It was a very invasive, verylong study, so it was difficult
to test it in dozens or hundredsof people, and out of the six

(01:00:08):
people that we tested, there wasone individual who performed
about 50% better on this newcarbohydrate formulation than on
the closest competitor.
Now it was clearly an anomaly,right, you don't perform 50%
better.
There was obviously donesomething differently because
you get these kinds ofstatistical anomalies.
Maybe the guy had a really goodnight's sleep before one trial

(01:00:37):
and not another because it was arepeated measure study.
Maybe he had a differentbreakfast, maybe there was just
obviously the stars all alignedfor this one, but it was
definitely anomalous, and so wewere kind of thinking, okay,
well, how do we is is clearly anoutlier here.
You know to include it in theanalysis.
The next week, this nutritioncompany had taken out a full a4
advert in a very well-knowntriathlon magazine and the

(01:01:00):
headline was perform up to 50better than the now closest
competitors.
Right now, this was thisresearch wasn't published, we
hadn't, we hadn't done thestatistical analysis, and the
fact that they'd said perform upto 50 better was sort of they
thought that was they get out ofjail free card and in the end,
they ended up going to courtbecause there was a length of

(01:01:21):
court case, because you can'tmake those kinds of claims.
So so that was one instance.
Another one that I wrote aboutin my book, the Skeptic's Guide
to Sports Science, was aroundthe same kind of time.
Another company was developinga different product that
contained it was again, it was atwo-to-one glucose fructose
formulation and it had caffeinein it and a few other bits and

(01:01:42):
pieces.
And they were convinced that itwas this new sort of high
powered performance supplement.
And just for marketing purposes, they wanted to test this
product with a professionalcyclist.
They just wanted to get onevery well-known professional
cyclist, you know relativelyfamous guy, and they wanted to
do two lab sessions.
On one session they wanted togive him this new product, and

(01:02:05):
on another one they would givethe closest competitors.
And I remember very clearly inthis meeting the CEO of this
nutrition company said listen,you know you could go ahead and
do the lab trial.
We'll have two lab trials,maybe three or four days apart.
So he's not fully rested whenyou give him our product.
We really want you to encouragehim, give him lots of

(01:02:25):
motivation.
I want you to tell him howgreat he's going to perform.
Tell him that this is a cuttingedge product.
You know really, gm up and yellat him and make sure he
performs really well, and whenyou give him the other product,
just leave him alone and justlet him get on with it.
Okay Now they were obviouslyconvinced that he was going to
perform better with theirproduct, convinced that he was

(01:02:47):
going to perform better withtheir product.
But they were in their minds,they were leaving no stone
unturned and making sure that hewas going to perform better
with their product.
And I'm pleased to say that Ideclined to do that kind of
quote unquote study and I didn'twant to be involved with it.
And they went to somebody else.
So I don't know whether or notthey did it and I'm just glad to
say that I declined to do itbecause I could see that it

(01:03:08):
wasn't, that it was disingenuousand I'd have to sacrifice my
intellectual integrity.
I guess the point of theanecdote is that you know, from
the stage of, from the variousstages of product development,
from conception of the productto the development, the taste
tests, all the way to the end,where you're doing the
scientific research on which youwant to market the product,
there is room for bias andthere's room for error, and that

(01:03:30):
can happen at any stage of theprocess, and you need people who
work at the companies and thescientists who work with them
and the scientists who aretaking grants from industry to
make sure that they are rigorous, that they abide by the science
, that they have good processesin place and that they retain
their intellectual integrity,because if you allow any of that

(01:03:51):
to slip, then you end up withcircumstances where you have
manufacturers that are makingclaims that are not supported by
the evidence 100%.

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
We presented a lot of skepticism.
Before we go on to thecommunication pieces of it, I
kind of have a question forSteph.
So everybody's going to startplaying conspiracy theorist and
saying, oh my God, we got totest everything.
I can't believe anything.
That's why I kind of why I senta goo to the lab as well, just
to quelch a little bit of that.
Should we start sendingeverything to labs?
I can't plunk down much more ofmy capital to do this.

(01:04:23):
So your answer is we can findanother solution.
But like what's the landscapehere, Steph?
Should we be reasonablyskeptical of this stuff, or what
?

Speaker 4 (01:04:38):
It's a good question, and it does open up the door
for more questions about thequality and the you know, the
integrity of other manufacturersof sports nutrition products.
But in my opinion this isn't anacross the board issue in the
industry.
This is a really isolated issuewithin a certain company, and I
don't know that for sure, but Ido know that most well not most

(01:04:59):
the companies that I have hadcommunications with have a much
more detailed process, and forit to come out that far
different there would be a bigoversight.
And so I think we know thatthere are differences in
products and there is a 20%allowance on the RDA with the
calorie and the carbohydratecontent, but that isn't a

(01:05:20):
massive difference from what isshown on the packaging.
And when we're thinking aboutengineered food generally,
there's a recipe and a formulaand a weight that is going into
this recipe, and for it to bethat far off would take a lot of
mistakes, and so I'm not overlyconcerned about testing every

(01:05:41):
single product out there.
But I think when there isskepticism about something being
too good to be true or just itdoesn't seem to add up, that's
when we start to look into it alittle further.

Speaker 1 (01:05:53):
So just to bring in the Redditors?
Golly, I can't believe I'mgiving them so much credit after
I've given them so much shitfor years.
They have already done theinitial dehydration experiments
with other gels, and those othergels they basically pan out,
pan out right, I mean to theprecision of how you can
dehydrate something in a kitchendehydrator or something like
that.
So to back up your point, steph, there's no reason to be kind

(01:06:16):
of like skeptical of it, in thesame way or the same origin,
with the same origin story thatwe were skeptical of the springs
product there are otherexamples, though, of where this
kind of a controversy orinstance has led to an
industry-wide kind of change inthe supplement industry.

Speaker 2 (01:06:36):
It was the nsf and certified for sport, where
certain you know companies havesaid hey, if we want to be
credible in an unregulatedindustry, we're going to have
third-party testing and showthat our product is what we say
it is.
And then, way back when on abenchmark, crisis comms kind of

(01:07:02):
situation was when Tylenol wastempered with was when Tylenol
was tampered with, and that ledto the development of
tamper-proof packaging andthings like that, because they
had to figure out a way to havepeople trust the product and
rebuild trust in the fact thatthey were going to be safe.
So obviously this is verydifferent than something that's

(01:07:26):
tampering with medication ortainted supplements a batch

(01:07:49):
standpoint to send our stuff toa lab and publish the results on
our website, just so thatpeople can have a level of trust
that we're doing what we say wewere doing.
It wasn't something that theyneeded to do five years ago
because this hadn't come up yet,so I'm not blaming anybody for
not doing it in the past, butthis is the kind of thing that
can cause a little bit of a seachange within industries.

Speaker 1 (01:08:07):
Yeah, I mean, I can absolutely imagine that being
one of the steps, Should Springsurvive this.
I think that's an if at thispoint they're such a small
company and it affects a bigpart of their product line.

Speaker 3 (01:08:18):
So Coop, does Spring have the informed sport
endorsement?
No, because one thing thatinformed, well informed sport do
two very important things.
So anybody who's not familiarwith informed sport or informed
choice, it's the third partysport supplement testing
protocol and they test for twodifferent things.

(01:08:38):
First, they test forcontaminated substances, so they
check for banned substances andthey third party test them at
various stages of themanufacturing process to make
sure, or to reduce the risk asmuch as possible, that there's
going to be any kind ofsupplement contamination with a
banned substance.
So you you it.
By by using something that hasthe informed sport stamp, you

(01:09:00):
minimize the risk ofinadvertently doping.
They also test that theproducts contain what is stated
on the label, and they do thatwith pre and post certification
testing.
So again, at various stages ofthe manufacturing process and
post certification as well,they're testing the products to
make sure that they contain theamounts that are stated on the

(01:09:22):
label.
So I think, if you're in anydoubt, I don't think it's
realistic to be sending offevery single supplement that you
intend to or every singleproduct that you intend to use,
sending it off to an independentlab and paying thousands of
dollars.
But if you're in any doubt,just use something that is
endorsed by informed sport,because that's kind of what
they're there for.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):
I mean there's like what he said, there's a reason
these third parties exist, andthat's to kind of, first off,
keep some checks and balances,but also offer some consumer
confidence, and I've spoken withother nutrition companies on
this.
They kind of love it and hateit at the same time.
I mean it's expensive, let'snot get that twisted right.
It's expensive for them to dothat.

(01:10:02):
It's an extra step.
It increases the cost of theproduct.
We're talking about $5 gelsstart out with, though Come on,
I mean this is the premiumproduct to start out with, but
at the end of the day, theconsumer has the confidence that
what is listed on theingredient deck and the
composition of the actualproduct is what it stated.
And then, from an elite athleteperspective, it's a non-starter

(01:10:22):
.
I don't have any of my athletesuse any supplement products,
not food products, butsupplement products that don't
contain either, that are noteither NSF certified or informed
choice.
That's just a very simplenon-starter.
There's just too much, as youhave studied, nick there's just
too much contamination in that,in that world, to even remotely

(01:10:44):
take that risk.
Let's pivot to communications,because this is part of the
storyline and what I kind ofwant to get out of this.
Once again, it'd be really easyto throw Springs PR team I
think I mentioned on my socialmedia posts we're going to send
them to the same Island forsending the UPR team.
It'd be very easy to cheekilydo that, which they kind of
deserve it.
But I do think that one of thethings we can offer the users

(01:11:07):
you know, listeners is how toread through some of the comms
to figure out what is actuallygoing on, because I do think
that there are patterns thatdevelop and things that
companies should do and thingsthat companies shouldn't do.
That If you've got a little bitof an attuned ear, not only can
you just kind of call BS on it,but you can also like read
between the tea leaves or readbetween the lines and figure out

(01:11:28):
what kind of what, what isactually going on.
So I'm going to set thetimeline up a little bit on this
because I think that'simportant.
So first off, we'll go back tothe Redditors dehydrating stuff,
nothing right, no, nocommunications kind of anything.
Some of those Redditors wouldreach out to spring and the
response that those Redditorswould reach out to Spring and
the response that thoseRedditors would post back on the

(01:11:49):
Reddit forums was.
We stand by our products.
Essentially People internal toSpring, their athlete
ambassadors and close to thecompany, things like that.
Hey, what do you think?
Kind of the same storyline thatwent on Sport Hunger over in
Germany.
Has lab results, they pull theproducts off their shelves.
Spring still doesn't really doanything.

(01:12:10):
The momentum builds and buildsand then all of a sudden, over
Memorial Day weekend, on aMonday, they issue a statement
to their customers, which wasweird because I'm a customer and
I didn't get it.
So I don't know whether theyintentionally redacted me from
the list.
We could leave the conspiracytheorists to figure that out.
But it's been widelydistributed and I'm going to
take 30 seconds here and justread this really quick for the

(01:12:31):
audience.
There'll be a copy on thewebsite, but I'm going to use
this as the lead in because thisis one inflection point, and
then I'm going to go through acouple of other pieces.
This statement, which is sentto Spring's customers, states
the following Spring Energy wascreated by athletes and for
athletes.
We are deeply connected to ourcommunity and understand the
importance of nutrition andalways strive to create high

(01:12:53):
quality, whole food based sportsnutrition products.
Despite being a small business,our products have been
instrumental in empoweringathletes globally in their quest
for excellence.
In early May, we submittedAwesome Sauce for third party
caloric and biomolecularanalysis.
Although the results indicatedthat, on average, our products

(01:13:13):
delivered the designed nutritionvalue, we have recognized
weaknesses in our processes andingredients which can introduce
unwanted variations in somebatches.
I can barely get through thatparagraph without laughing, I'm
sorry.
To mitigate those variations inour small batch production, we
decided to modify some of thereformulate, modify some of the

(01:13:34):
re, some of the formulations,sorry revise and innovate
processes and re-evaluateingredient sources.
These changes will bring higherquality and more consistency to
our products.
Enhancements of our productsaimed to stabilize the nutrition
values are on the horizon andwithin the next few weeks you'll
see the results of our efforts.

(01:13:54):
A new and improved version ofAwesome Sauce will soon be
available.
We are confident that theseadjustments will elevate the
quality of our efforts.
A new and improved version ofawesome sauce will soon be
available.
We are confident that theseadjustments will elevate the
quality of our products, furthersupporting athletes at all
levels achieving their peakperformance.
Nature offers the optimal blendof nutrients and real food
consistency, providingeverything necessary for
outstanding performance.
So a little bit of a severalparagraph statement there.

(01:14:17):
So that was sent out on Mondayand just today, so the so in the
meantime, operations.

Speaker 3 (01:14:25):
I had to say the word salad of equivocation, but
basically they're saying thatnothing's really wrong because
it comes out exactly how weintended.
But also we're changing theproduct so that it does better.
It's like, well, which is it?

Speaker 1 (01:14:41):
okay, well, so an important point in the
background, before we start totear this apart ready, you're
going to take the lead on thisone is operations are as is, so
I can go and buy this at thefeed up until today.
I can go buy it on spring'swebsite and go buy it from any
other third-party distributor.
Miraculously, just this morning, somebody sent me an image of

(01:15:04):
awesome sauces page on spring'swebsite and it conveniently has
the nutrition label missing.
You can still buy it, but thenutrition label, the nutrition
facts, the calories and thecarbohydrate and things like
that is missing from thedescription.
There's literally a blank space.
Cue up Taylor Swift's blankspace.
There's literally a blank spaceon their screen.

(01:15:24):
Five minutes later the productis gone.
So take that for what you willwithin the sequence of events,
but the big thing is nothinghappened.
Everything's cool to Monday,monday this week, memorial day
press release gets sent out.
To Wednesday, when we'rerecording this, various parts of
their website and I can't claimto know all of it, but parts of

(01:15:44):
their website are attracted,and then this product is now
pulled from their website and Ihaven't scoured the rest of the
internet quite yet to see if youcan buy it anywhere else, but
that's the sequence of events.
So, okay, in Nick's words,roddy, what do you think of the
word salad?
And you just have a real daywith this.
I'm going to step out of theway for a second.

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):
I mean perfectly honest.
I'm less critical of it thanthan Nick is, and I think some
of that is because, having beenin the trenches of having to
create some of those things ortry to figure out how to
navigate some of those things,it's never perfect, it's always
a mess.
And even when somebody comesinto that process with the

(01:16:27):
intention of we're going to beclear, we're going to be honest,
we're going to live our values,it gets messy because you have
a lot of pride mixed up in itand it's really.
It is difficult to say wemessed up.
And if there's, if it's amistake, if it's something that
is fraud, it's even harder for acommunications person or

(01:16:49):
somebody who is now anintermediary because whoever's
writing that didn't do the thing, that was fraudulent to get the
company or the person, whoeverelse, to agree to say what
happened.
I mean, companies aren't goingto fall on their sword.
The other component of this isthat the statements are always.
The statement is the easy partin a lot of ways, because you

(01:17:13):
can be, you know, you can lookto your values, you can tell the
truth, you can, you know, statethe facts, you can tell people
what you're going to do, all ofthose things.
But that's not the expensivepart.
The expensive part is theconsequence that can now.
You have to deal with, refundsyou have to deal with.
How are we going to get thisstuff off the shelves?

(01:17:33):
How are we going to deal withwholesalers and dealers that may
not want to work with usanymore?
How is this going to affect allof our other products?
Like, the statement part is theeasy and inexpensive part, and
now is the really difficult partthat comes after.
Commiserate with thecommunications folks or even

(01:17:56):
with the brands, because evenwhen they do things incorrectly
or the brand is strugglingthrough those things, it's.
You just have to recognize thatit's never easy and it's never
there's no good way to getthrough it.
It's very easy to say, oh, youknow, be honest and say the
facts and do exactly what is theright thing to do, and you're

(01:18:19):
trying to.
I think most people are tryingto give you the benefit of the
doubt for that, but none of thisever comes away very simply or
easily or as clear cut as itseems.
Here's what.

Speaker 1 (01:18:30):
I can't get over and this gets.
This is before thecommunications piece, but it's
kind of part of thenon-communication piece of it at
the same time.
If I were running a nutritioncompany and somebody dehydrated
my carbohydrate product down to17 to 19 grams when it should be
45 grams, if I saw that, I'maware of it, let's be honest,

(01:18:50):
they knew about that componentof it.
There's no way it didn't kindof pop up on the radar
Immediately, immediately.
I would have recreated thatexperiment because it's not hard
.
All it costs you is your ownproduct.
You can run over to Home Depotor wherever else,
williams-sonoma, and buy akitchen dehydrator and you can
do it in a matter of hours, ifnot days.

(01:19:10):
It would be very easy torecreate that if you were
operating this company Now, I'mnot saying every company should
like chase down every conspiracytheory were operating this
company.
Now, I'm not saying everycompany should like chase down
every conspiracy theory, right,but this is, let's face it, it's
an ultra marathon Reddit forum,like these people are into the
sport.
They're not here to like takedown big whatever, big
carbohydrate, big sugar,whatever, not.

(01:19:31):
That spring is a big company oranything like that.
They're not here.
Nefariously, I guess, is whatI'm saying, and so what I can
understand is why wouldn't youat least take the low cost, low
effort step of verifying thisinitial thing that happened as a
basis for the truth, and thenyou can go okay, we're going to

(01:19:52):
send all of our stuff to a laband then you can determine when
do we actually pull it off theshelves, when do we communicate
with our customers and thingslike that.
But the whole, what I can't getover in this whole
non-communication piece, is thehorse blinders piece of it, and
that's what I'm having such ahard time wrapping my head
around that both Ruddy and I wehave been in the trenches of

(01:20:13):
small business for a long timeand when those businesses are
going really well and we got tofreaking, pull stuff out of pull
quarters, out of our cat, outof our couch to like make
payroll and stuff like that, Iget it.
I totally, I totally get it.
But if somebody were sayingsomething like that about a
product that I created, it wouldbe very easy to recreate that
experiment and actually verify,and then if it's verifiable,

(01:20:36):
then okay, you can go.
And then if it's not, you cansay hey, listen, I did the same
thing and I found a differentresult.
Let's figure out why we havethe different result.
I just can't.
I can't understand that pieceof.
Excuse me, I can't understandthat piece of the whole
communication timeline, outsideof the things that actually came
out afterwards, and that,honestly, is what makes the

(01:20:57):
things that come out afterwardsso weird.
It's like why would you?
Initially?
There's no plausible way.
If you like, are a smart personand you have a PhD in these
areas that this companyapparently has, you can look at
these home dehydrationexperiments as reasonable
proxies for finding out thenutritional composition of your

(01:21:20):
products.
I don't understand why you justdon't look at that and go okay,
we're going to figure it outourselves.

Speaker 4 (01:21:25):
Especially when the product is your company.
It's not just like a littlepart of what you do.
That is the foundation of whatthis?
Company is.

Speaker 2 (01:21:35):
Well, that and I key in a little bit when they say we
are athletes and we're made forathletes, et cetera You're
putting your brand, you'reembedding your brand in the
community, you're saying yourbrand is part of the community.
If the community is thereforeresponding to the product and
saying, hey, there's a problem,you can't then stand aside from

(01:21:57):
the community that you weresupposed to be part of.
I mean, it's that, to me, isthat whole thing about.
When the problems occur, youlook first to the values of your
company.
If the value of the company isthat we are here for athletes,
to help them perform at theirbest, and there's something
coming up that is being broughtup by the community saying, hey,
there's a problem with yourproduct, that's one of the

(01:22:18):
things that you take seriously.
And then you do something about.
And there's a tendency,especially now with social media
, how quick, fast it is thatthere are competing viewpoints
on either you have to be firstand you have to be fast and you
have to tackle things absolutelyimmediately.
And then there's the wait a sec.

(01:22:40):
You have to.
You don't want to chase tags,you can't play whack-a-mole and
address every single person andwaiting a little bit until you
have your facts straight andknow what your facts are is
important so that you can speakwith clarity.
You don't want the brand.
If I were in the brand, if Iwere in the brand's shoes or
have been in brand shoes, youdon't want to flip-flop.

(01:23:02):
You don't want to say, you know, proclaim, we're, we have it,
we're right and we haveeverything fine, and then a week
later go oops, sorry, we'rewrong, it's like.
So I give them some grace withnot reacting immediately to the
first redditor who came up withyou.

Speaker 1 (01:23:18):
you know the dehydration study, but there was
a few, I mean, let's not getlet's remember the facts here,
there was at least three, but Ithink maybe even four, like
people in their freakingkitchens.

Speaker 2 (01:23:29):
It's been replicated?
I think that it may be andagain I it's hard to put myself
in.
I don't want to put myself intheir shoes, that not knowing
all of the things, but you wouldthink that at that point it may
have been wise to at leastacknowledge that they knew that
there was discussion happeningand that they were taking it

(01:23:50):
seriously and were going to takea look at it.
They didn't have to have ananswer at that point.
They just had to have been ableto say we understand there's
questions and we're going totake a look at it.

Speaker 3 (01:24:00):
Yeah, which, which is why I'm sort of frustrated and
surprised at their firstofficial statement about the
whole thing, because they justequivocate.
You know, if there's an errorand you've made a mistake and
there's an error in theformulation, then you just say
sorry, we've made a mistake inour formulation and we've
changed it, or we're changing itand we're going to make sure
that we do better going forward.

(01:24:21):
But what they've actually saidis this product has been
designed as per the formulation.
However, we realized that thereare some errors here and that
we're going to change theformulation going forward.
It's like, well, you can'treally have it both ways.
Yeah, I think if there's anerror, you have to nip that
thing in the bud.
You have to be very clear, verytransparent.

(01:24:41):
Nip that thing in the bud anddo better going forward.

Speaker 4 (01:24:45):
And if we've learned anything from the UTMB drama,
it's that being transparent andan apology goes a long ways.

Speaker 1 (01:24:53):
Yeah, I mean sometimes if you just say, hey,
I'm sorry I screwed this up, Isaid that to all of my athletes
that had this in their nutritionplan.
I never recommended it, but ifit worked for them I'd let them
do it.
I want to be clear about that.
But all my athletes that haveused this within their nutrition
plan I'm going back to them allI'm sorry I screwed up.
I should have seen this, and soI just the whole.
It's just kind of incredible tome the obtuseness of the all of

(01:25:25):
the communication in terms oftaking responsibility for
anything and just saying, listen, we screwed up, that's all.

Speaker 2 (01:25:32):
You know.
Going back to something thatSteph said earlier about, you
know you're a nutritionprofessional versus a, an
influencer versus a coach or abrand that's endorsing or
recommending a product.
One of the things that we didwhen we had partnerships with
the nutrition companies, wenever told.
We always said to coaches andbelieved from the beginning that

(01:25:56):
we put athletes first, put theathletes interest first, and if
that meant that the product, thenutrition product that we had
an endorsement with or had apartnership with, wasn't working
for the athlete, we didn't sayuse it anyway.
Yeah, level, we used nutritionproducts that were appropriate

(01:26:22):
for the athlete, whether basedon taste or based on ingredients
or formulations or whatever thecase may be.
And I think that part of.
Again, I don't know if this isnecessarily the case, but one of
the things that is differentnow than was happening when we
were doing endorsement dealswith nutrition products back in
the day is the influencerculture, and the influencer

(01:26:44):
culture is an ambassador cultureis somewhat different in that
people want to maintain theirpositions as influencers with
companies and ambassadors andwhatever.
So they will.
I think there's an incentive torecommend products, whether
they, you know, work perfectlyfor everybody or not.

(01:27:04):
The incentives are different, Ithink, for influencers and
ambassadors now than they usedto be.

Speaker 1 (01:27:08):
Well, here's how I come at it from a coaching
perspective.
If you're a coach, yourconstituents and your customers
are athletes and you should belooking out for those
constituents and customers fromthe get-go with the utmost
amount of focus.
Your constituents are not thebrands, they're not the people

(01:27:29):
who make shoes, they're not thepeople who make nutrition
products and things like that.
If you are a coach, you arethere to serve your athletes.
They're your customers and yourconstituents at the same time.
And it becomes really conflatedwhen you have people who are in
the influencer space that areboth coaches and athletes.
Steph has kind of got thatright.
She experienced that when shewas, when she's over at Cliff

(01:27:51):
and still has a lot of that, hasa lot of that today where
you've got to like wear thesekind of, where you've got to
wear these, these multiple hats.
But if you are a coach andyou're a professional coach and
that's all you do for a living,I do think that we need to
reevaluate, as a coachingprofession as a whole, how we
handle these endorsements andpartnerships, because we've been

(01:28:14):
through the whole thing and itwas always a company endorsement
thing, ruddy.
I mean we always sent pressreleases and content and things
like that out on the behest ofthe company, but it was never
our individual coaches and Ihonestly still to this day kind
of conflicted about it.
And just to be transparent withthe audience here, I was part
of the team at times that wouldhelp go out into the space and

(01:28:36):
find some of these endorsementdeals that I just mentioned.
Some of them were VIK deals,some of them were VIK plus cash.
None of them were pay for play,meaning we would make money off
of the sale.
We would always make money offof the endorsement and then the
content that was wrapped aroundit and things like that.
But because I was a little bitI don't know whether conflict is
the right word but just becausethe nature of everything

(01:28:56):
changed when I became afreelancer and independent
contractor, I just said I'm notdealing with this anymore.
It's not part of my businessmodel.
I don't want to do it.
I don't want to deal with thepotential conflict or the real
conflict or anything of the sort.
I'm going to serve athletes andathletes first.

(01:29:19):
It's been very, it's been veryrelieving that I don't have to
manage that, that that push pullthat is inevitably there.
Nobody's trying to do and wecertainly weren't trying to do
anything nefarious ever, butthere still is a conflict
between man.
I really want you to like a gooenergy gel, you know, because
they're my boy.
I just talked to you know.
Just talk to Brian on the phoneLike they're your people, you
know, and it's not working foryou.
We want to try to make it work,like there still is that little

(01:29:40):
bit of internal conflict, and soI guess what I'm trying to say
is I get it for the athletes outthere that are also coaches and
do have these partnerships,that there is some sort of
conflict there that's hard towrestle with.
And I don't have the I honestlydon't have the best answer for
everybody.
I have the best answer for me,which is I don't do it, and I do
think that coaches if you areout there as a individual coach

(01:30:01):
should try to avoid these almostat all costs, if avoid them
completely.
But I'm not going to profess tosay that's the right answer for
everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:30:08):
Well, I guess the most important thing is just to
be transparent with anypotential conflicts that you
have, whether that's as a coachand going very quickly back to
what you asked me earlier onabout how these products are
developed in the scientificspace.
Anytime you publish a study as ascientist that has industry
funding, you have an ethicalobligation to state that the
thing was funded by a particularcompany.

(01:30:29):
You have to put it in the in aseparate section at the bottom
of the paper that says conflictsof interest, and you have to
state any potential conflictsthat you have.
If you do any consulting withany external companies if you
have, if your lab is funded byany grants from any particular
companies, that all goes intopotential conflicts of interest
and I think it's the same acrossthe board.

(01:30:50):
Whether you're a scientist orwhether you're a coach or
whether you're an athlete, youshould have to be transparent
with any of these businessrelationships that you harbor so
that anybody that you work withhas the information that they
need to make an independentjudgment as to whether they want
to work with you or not.

Speaker 1 (01:31:04):
It's tricky because, as we went through with staff,
the level of involvement is sodifferent at every step, right?
So some of these athletes andambassadors they just endorse
the product and there are goingto be athlete ambassadors of
spring that are going to getcaught in the crossfire here and
I feel horribly for them.
They got duped just likeeverybody else did, let's be
honest.
But when you're part of theteam and this is where I really

(01:31:27):
kind of struggle when you haveeither positioned yourself or
you are actually part of theteam that helped develop it at
any one component, there isresponsibility there and it
might not be a hundred percentwho knows where the percentage
lies, and things like that.
But at a certain point, if youhave your name on it, if you've

(01:31:49):
professed to be involved in thedevelopment process, if you have
professed to create it, if youprofess to whatever vocabulary
that you want to use to create aproduct, and that product goes
north or south, either way, youcan take credit for it.
When it goes north and you gotto take the blame for it to go
south, you can't do both right.
You can't cheer.
Coaches have a really actuallybig problem with this, with

(01:32:10):
their athletes across the board.
We take way too much creditwhen things are going well and
we don't take nearly enoughresponsibility when they don't.
And I'm saying that as aprofession and I'm and I am
included in that.
But with the sponsorship thing,we, with these levels of
involvement that stuff was goingthrough earlier, I do think the
people that were involved inthese particular products,

(01:32:31):
irrespective of how much theywere involved, you have to own
part of it because you can'tlike say it's an awesome sauce
name.
You can't say it's awesome andamazing and blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, and everybody shouldjust be using it and look at
this great product and then,when it turns South, be like, ah
well, what really happened wasI just did this or I just did
that, not, you can't get, youcan't get away with that.
It's going to react to that.

(01:32:51):
But you know that I it's goingto it's.
But I guess what I'll say withit is it has to go both ways.
If you've promoted it for yearsand it turns out to be
something that it's not, you'vegot to look at it and say,
listen, guys, my bad, I gotscrewed with the rest of you
guys.
Or here's what my real level ofinvolvement was If it was

(01:33:13):
different and kind of pay amendsfor that.
But all that stuff is comingand I think that everybody kind
of needs to use this to look inthe mirror a little bit and
reevaluating how authenticallythey are presenting themselves
in terms of their impact, of thedevelopment of these various
products, whether it's innutrition or gear or shoes and
things like that.

Speaker 4 (01:33:33):
I 100% agree with that and I think when you have
your name associated with aproduct or a brand, you are tied
to it and you do need to beable to stand behind it, because
the brand is gaining from usingyour name 100% they are.
So it should be a reciprocalrelationship.
But then also, if you're goingto put your name on something,
you need to stand behind it.

(01:33:54):
I'm just thinking of, like youmentioned, the pack.
I had a pack experience withNathan, a hundred percent stood
behind it and was involved in itacross the board and could
proudly, you know, say, like youknow, I knew what the product
was, and I think that's animportant thing for any athlete
considering sponsorship.
Any coach, um, that's workingwith brands, whether it be, uh,

(01:34:17):
podcast endorsement, sponsorship, any coach that's working with
brands, whether it be a podcastendorsement, sponsorship, like
article, like, if you areattached to a brand in some
capacity, you are responsiblefor that.

Speaker 1 (01:34:29):
It's tricky when it's your name.
I remember that my wife lovedthat pack.
By the way, I think I boughther like two.
Yeah, good, great pack, two orthree of them.

Speaker 2 (01:34:36):
To some extent there's a, especially when it
came to the endorsement dealsand things like that.
There's also a sense of stayingwithin your scope of expertise.
So when we endorsed power barproducts and goo products and
things along those lines, partof those endorsement deals were
content generation for them, butwe weren't producing content

(01:34:59):
around.
Here's the science of the drinkor the this or the that, or
telling that story of how it wasproduced.

Speaker 1 (01:35:06):
Because Asker did that.
He was a better authority toappeal to than we are.
I mean, he had the mostcredible authority in the world
at the time.

Speaker 2 (01:35:13):
so of course, Right, but we were providing content on
the application of generalsports science knowledge of how
do you hydrate, how do you usenutrition products in general,
how do you eat during events,how do you train and fuel your
training, and things along thoselines, which was within our

(01:35:35):
scope of expertise, not themolecular weight of this
material that was in the gel.
So if people are going to haverelationships with companies, I
think it's similar to going intothose relationships thinking of
what can I authenticallycontribute to that brand and in

(01:36:01):
through this endorsement?
And if it's something thatyou're being asked to contribute
that is beyond your scope,admit that or, you know, put the
brakes on there and go.
Yeah, that's.
I'm not comfortable with doingthat because that's outside my
scope.

Speaker 1 (01:36:14):
Scope of expertise and coaching is like another big
topic that we could spendanother couple hours on.
Okay, let's wrap it up.
I got one question for you guys.
I'm gonna put you on the spot.
What could transpire for you?
Can?
I'll give you two venues forthis, just to make it easy.
What could transpire so thatyou could recommend these
products, these spring products,to your athletes or take them

(01:36:37):
yourselves and it could be, I'mtaking them in right now because
I know what's in them to never.
That's the scope, so ready, wecould start with you.

Speaker 2 (01:36:45):
Put you on the spot first I think if they were to,
you know, to either reformulateor publish the data on some sort
of certification of what's inthe product, if I still liked
the taste and they still workedfor me and whatever else, then I
could see people continuing touse them.
I think the biggest problemthat I would have in that sense

(01:37:08):
right now, though, is they'renot that different than anything
else that's out there, so if,putting things side by side and
now I have a doubt about thisone why bother giving them a
second chance?
I've got 14 other choices thatI haven't had that problem, so
you know fool me once, shame onme.

Speaker 1 (01:37:33):
Fool me twice.
Shame on you.
There's been a lot of foolinggoing on, so don't blame you.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice.
Shame on me.
All right, steph, you get to go.

Speaker 4 (01:37:42):
I will echo what Ruddy said about there being so
many other products on themarket that are the same or
better, and I guess for mepersonally never, but for an
athlete I would consider notrecommending it, including it as
part of a fueling plan If thecompany were to set the record

(01:38:04):
straight on how this happenedbecause I can't trust the
company otherwise and I don'tknow exactly what that would
look like but how this bigoversight happened and issue an
apology, be really transparentwith that, I don't.
That would go a long ways, Ithink, with this community and
then you know, people wouldmaybe understand and that could

(01:38:24):
be remedied in the future sothat their product does not have
this big mismatch.

Speaker 3 (01:38:30):
Yeah, I mean, for the time being, we don't know
what's in this stuff because,according to their most recent
statement, they're updating theformula and they're changing
things.
So the actual formulation is ina state of flux to begin with.
So we don't know if it has 20grams of carb, if they're
increasing it to 40 or 45 orwhat.
So we have no idea what theactual ingredients are going to

(01:38:51):
be and what the nutritionalcontent will be.
I kind of agree with Stefan thatthey either needed to make a
statement to the effect of werealize there are some concerns
and problems, we're going toinvestigate this and get back to
you, which they haven't done orthey need to refute the claims
that have been made, sayingwe've done our own internal

(01:39:12):
tests and what you're saying isnot true.
Or the third option is to stateunequivocally sorry, we effed up
and we're going to make some.
Or the third option is to stateunequivocally sorry, we effed
up and we're going to make somechanges, in which case they need
to publish their own internalfindings and, instead of just
saying that the nutritionalcontent fell short or whatever,
whatever phrasing they used,tell us by how much it fell

(01:39:33):
short and tell us what was wrong.
Just be transparent because,again to echo what you guys have
said, this is an oversaturatedspace that you've got to give
good reason why we should chooseyour product over the dozens of
others that are available, andso you need to be very proactive
and and nip this thing in thebud, state what errors were made

(01:39:54):
, what changes you're going tomake, and then be transparent
with the data that you havegoing forwards.

Speaker 1 (01:39:59):
I think we're all kind of coming to the same
conclusion here.
The thing that I'll add is kindof on the beginning.
So, first off, these are onlythree products in their entire
product line.
They have other products thatyou can make into a drink mix.
They have other products it'skind of more of a snack, you
know, oat-based product andthings like that.
Right now I would not only notrecommend any of their products

(01:40:21):
in their lineup, but I woulddissuade anybody from taking
them If I just I went and boughtthese from the runner's roost
downtown, shout out to thoseguys I've liked them for a long
time and I told them the wholedeal.
I'm like listen, just so youguys know this is what's
happening with this product,just to let the retailer know.
Right, because they're friendsof mine and been in the
community for years and I feelobligated to at least let them

(01:40:43):
kind of peel the curtain back alittle bit.
But I would dissuade athletesfrom using these products across
the board.
I don't trust them at all.
Speaking to our earlier pointthat if you're using kind of the
same ingredients across a lotof your product lines, most
likely those product lines aregoing to also be affected.
That's an allegedly statementright now, right, but it's a
logical one.
But certainly we know thatthese three products are

(01:41:05):
effective.
And even if an athlete wantedto say, you know what I wanted
to get, what did I just say thisHill 8 has 10 grams of
carbohydrate.
Let's say I wanted to get, youknow, 40 grams of carbohydrate
per hour from this one product.
I really liked it, you know,let's go ahead and do it.
I would still dissuade thembecause I don't have enough
confidence in the consistency.
Sure, the batch that I sent tothe lab and just to clarify, the

(01:41:25):
lab gets eight or 10 gels,depending upon the weight.
They combine them all and thenthey take a sample from that.
It's not like they're squeezingout one gel into a machine and,
you know, while on it actuallyhappens, they're taking several
of them and taking, kind of anaverage of, or take, taking that
entire seven as a whole sample.
I don't have the, I don't havethe confidence that these
products are consistent either,because they're just so far off.

(01:41:48):
So even if an athlete wanted toget all 60 grams of
carbohydrate through six ofthese at the tune of what's six
times five, $30, $30 an hour tofuel your next ultra marathon, I
would still, even though theresources to do that outside of
the cost, I'd still dissuadethem.
So, going forward, I'd kind ofhave my two things are on or my

(01:42:09):
things are on two pillars.
First one is how it happened.
Show me the data, show me wherein the process it got awry.
Show me, yep, these productsstarted here and they ended here
and this is how it happened.
You have to be able to show methat.
Second thing once all thisreformulation actually happens,
get third-party testing, notyour own stuff, some third-party

(01:42:30):
organization of which there aremany that can release the
results without you having tointerface with anybody.
I have to have kind of thosecomponents before it's even part
of any, even part of in thedialogue.
So that's where it is for meright now, and I don't know not
to try to overread the sentimentand the community as a whole,

(01:42:51):
but I'll go out on a limb andsay that's going to be
relatively consistent across thecommunity and when you paint
that picture out it's kind of ableak one.

Speaker 2 (01:43:00):
But what do you think from the?
There's another layer in there,though, in terms of there's
direct to consumer, so you haveto have consumer trust.
But there's a business layerwholesalers and dealers and
people were buying these in bulkto resell, and are they going
to be willing to take the riskon a product that they're?

Speaker 1 (01:43:22):
unsure of?
Yeah, probably not.
I mean one of the things, oneof the things kind of lurking in
the background that we didn'ttalk about so much, is the
awesome sauce specifically,which is kind of the first
product in question.
It was spring's bestsellingproduct, or at least spring put
it on their website as theirbestselling product, and I and
you know you can kind of rollthat forward that it was
probably a good moneymaker for alot of a lot of specialty

(01:43:43):
retail, small run stores, aswell as the feed, any sort of
other online retailers likerunning warehouse and things
like that.
They're selling through thisproduct.
It's always sold out, right, sothey're making money off of it,
just like sport hunger.
Those points of purchase areholding part of the refund bag,
and maybe not all of it, butcertainly part of it, depending
upon how they actually want todeal with spring in this

(01:44:06):
capacity, and they have anagreement to distribute this and
I don't want to try to unwindin any of those.
But to your point, roddy,there's still risk involved with
those distributors.
Who knows what their sentimentis.
Personally, I wouldn't want totouch it with a 10 foot pole
Like come on, you're going tobuy, you're going to put a
product up on your websiteknowing that you know a hundred

(01:44:27):
percent of it could be returned.
I'm kind of shocked that, atleast as of this morning, I
could buy it on the feed,because I sent the feed, the
results as well, because theywere the point of purchase.
I'm trying to be transparenthere.
Right, I sent it to everybodythat was involved, I sent it to
the Roches, I sent it to the CEOof Spring and I sent it to the
feed, where I bought the product, and it'll be the same with the

(01:44:47):
other products that I buy.
So, anyway, I don't know I mean, certainly the direct to
consumer model is really hardhere.
Right, you've got to have otherdistribution networks in order
to kind of scale up yourbusiness, and I can imagine
that's going to be part of thestoryline is the trust within
the other outlets, whetherthey're physical break of mortar
outlets or online outlets.
Dang covered a lot.

(01:45:08):
Good job, team.
All right, thanks you guys forcoming on.
I know it's hard.
I know it's kind of hard tolevel out some criticism.
I think we did it in a fair andreasonable way.
We intellectualize the thingswe need to talk about.
We didn't speculate all toomuch, brought the facts to the
table and I think I can kind ofspeak for the group here is we
just want people to have thebest information.
That's why we have thisresearch newsletter.

(01:45:29):
We try to cut through theclutter.
We're not trying to offer upany sort of hyperbole or hype it
up or anything like that.
We just want people to haveinformation and informed
opinions based on ourexperiences and our education
backgrounds and our professionalbackgrounds, and I think this
is something where we could allkind of come to the table and

(01:45:49):
bring a little bit to it fromacademia, from communications,
from coaching, from nutrition,from an athlete perspective.
Kind of got it all here.
So, thank you guys, thank you,yeah thanks, all right, folks.
There you have it.
There you go, you guys, thankyou, yeah, thanks, all right,
folks.
There you have it.
There you go.
What do you think we I tell youwhat we are not done with this.
There is going to be a fewfurther dominoes to fall in this
whole chain of events.

(01:46:10):
Like I said, just keep in mindwhen you're listening to this we
recorded this on wednesday, may29th, and it is going to come
out or actually hit your earssometime later, and there
probably have been things thathave transpired since then,
since a lot of this is moving soquickly, but I hope the content
that we discussed with ourgroup here remains evergreen,
because some of these lessonsare actually timeless.

(01:46:32):
How you actually partner withcompanies to create products
that's actually timeless.
How nutrition companiesfunction and how one error can
become multiple errors across anutrition line those things are
actually timeless and, I think,can extend far beyond this one
single controversy.
Throughout all of this, I'vetried to be as transparent as

(01:46:53):
possible and I hope you guys theaudience appreciates that.
All of the documents that I'vecollected have always been for
free on my website, with noemail registration or anything
like that.
I'm never going to kind oftrack you down.
I've provided these documentsto anybody who's asked for them.
I have absolutely zero to gainhere and I've already lost a
whole heck of a lot.
This has cost me a lot of timeand money and things like that,

(01:47:16):
but ultimately I wanted peopleto have the truth, because one
thing that I did learnthroughout this entire process
is it does take a lot ofpressure for change to actually
happen.
I was a laggard to this.
Hunger Sport had already donetheir thing.
The fine folks over in theReddit community had already
done their thing and yet nothinghad actually changed.
And I know a lot of you outthere have criticized the

(01:47:38):
intensity with which I delivereda lot of the messaging on
social media, and for that Idon't have a whole lot of
apologies.
To be quite frank with you,because the needle clearly was
not moving in the direction thatit needed to get moved to with
just data.
All of the data was actuallyalready out there.
The whole thing needed a littlebit more emotion behind it to

(01:47:59):
propagate it forward.
So remember that.
You want to throw me a littlebit of criticism?
Fine, I have thick skin, but atthe end of the day, look at
where we're at right nowcompared to where we were at
about a week ago and when thiswhole thing started.
All right, folks, that is itfor today and, as always, we
will see you out on the trails.

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Spring Energy - Nutrition Integrity and Transparency #226

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